The Yellow Sofa (New Directions Classics)

About this book

Jos Maria Ea de Queirs the first great modern Portuguese novelist wrote The Yellow Sofa with as he said "no digressions no rhetoric " where "everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated." The story a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals concerns Godofredo Alves a successful buoyant businessman who returns home to find his wife "on the yellow damask sofa... leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man..." The man is none other than Machado his best friend and business partner. Godofredo struggles with the public need to defend his honor and a stronger inner desire for forgiveness and domestic tranquillity. The Babel Guide to Portuguese Fiction notes "The genius of this book is how Ea captures all the emotional fluctuations... and with such accuracy. The result is an enjoyable humorous novella that is simultaneously breathtakingly ironic." The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Ea de Queirs in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens Flaubert Balzac and Tolstoy.